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| Authored by: Imaginos1892 on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 04:40 PM EST |
You obviously know nothing about agriculture. Or much of anything else.
"The Nature" produces about enough food to support one adult human
per square mile; less in mountains, deserts and swamps. The continental
United States is less than 4 million square miles in extent. Which 2 1/2
million out of 315 million people should live --- and who decides?
Because without farming and herding, that's how many we can feed.
Our modern crops produce 20 to 50 times as much food as their wild
ancestors because we have been genetically modifying them through
crossbreeding and selection for 15,000 years. What you ignorant
Luddites call "GM" crops are just the latest results achieved by
more sophisticated and efficient methods.
Now I'm not saying it's all good. Genetic engineering can not only
produce results much faster than crossing and selection, it can
do things that are otherwise impossible, like getting corn to
produce a bacterial toxin that kills corn borers. We must decide
whether that is less hazardous than spraying the field with poison.
If we do neither, we lose up to 40% of the crop to pests. Meaning
we have to farm 60-70% more land to get the same amount of food.
Agricultural efficiency is the very basis of civilization. Back in the
Stone Age, food production consumed over 90% of our available
labor, leaving very little time or energy for anything else. There
is a reason it's called "subsistence" - that's about all you get.
Up until the 19th century it took 4 farmers to feed one non-farmer.
80% of the people out busting their tookus in the fields all day
every day, and most of the rest spending most of their time doing
jobs that supported the farmers. Few had any time for education,
engineering, medicine, trade or travel. Today, one farmer feeds
80 non-farmers and we have time for all sorts of other things.
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Ma Lemming: If all your friends jumped off a cliff
into the sea, would you....oh....um....never mind.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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